I forgot one thing when talking about value, product excellence, and warranties the other day – something which an anonymous reader pointed out to me via email.

It was purported in this correspondence that Apple Powerbooks have pretty darn good resale value compared to Dells, or any other PC platform, for that matter.

So I did some checking on my own….. What did I find out?

It is true. In a not-so-circumspect examination of selling prices of Powerbooks on eBay, I found that used Powerbooks do indeed fetch fairly significant prices compared to original retail values. Based on some back of the envelope calculations, I found that those puppies generally sold for up to 70% of original retail, at an average of one year old. This rough estimate excluded most items with any add-ons such as software or extra memory.

PC notebooks, on the other hand, did not fare as well. On average, they fetched roughly 50% of retail price after one year. Huh. There were a few exceptions, but this seemed the norm.

Keep in mind, I did not regress pricing data against age, with a 95% confidence interval, for a statistically relevant r-squared, nor did I gather what would otherwise be deemed a significant number of data points. This was just a rough guess, based on perusal of approximately 50 items, and comparison to some published (albeit old) pricing data.

Now I do not know if this has something to do with the fact that Intel chips are on a shorter upgrade cycle than PowerPCs, or that Wintel slabs are generally cheaper to start with, but I thought it was worth noting, nonetheless.

There is something about those darn Apples, that set them apart from the oranges.